My Life List

In affectionate memory of William Shawn.

My life list is in no way comparable to Sandy Frazier’s, and I hope that anyone reading this will not even faintly imagine that I am presuming otherwise as I go on to mention my own modest history with eccentric food. In this field, Sandy is an idol—certainly my idol, probably your idol. He it was who improved his understanding of wild trout by filling his belly with brown-drake mayflies, chewing thoughtfully while they fluttered on his tongue (“If you’re into mayflies, it’s hard to eat just one”). He it is whose acquired tastes run to things like grasshopper juice and cricket thighs (“the feel of the cricket’s toothpicky legs between my teeth”). A gift of chocolate-covered ants and bees appealed to him less for the chocolate than for the “chitinous crunch.” Long known in these pages as Ian, a name unfairly thought to be a sign of personal aggrandizement, he reads Leviticus for the sheer pleasure of its culinary attention to “unclean creeping things.” That phrase belongs, Lord knows, to Leviticus, for it could never be from Sandy, who is incapable of writing such a description of anything, anywhere, that can qualify as protein.

I am simply not in his league, and prefer my place on the sidelines, admiring what I see. I mean, yes, when I was eight years old in the Vermont fish hatchery I used to swallow little two-inch whole trout—toss them high in the air and stagger around under them and catch them wriggling in my open mouth—but I never reached the point of eventual development implied by that early promise. When Sandy eats something that you don’t find at ShopRite, at least not for sale at ShopRite, he does it for the art of it—in his word, the “show” of it—while I only do it for a living. I’ve eaten things like dock, burdock, chicory, chickweed, snapper eggs, porpoise, and mountain oysters, but almost always in the line of duty—on-the-job consumption. If I am out working and some novel thing is set in front of me, I’ll eat it. But some novel thing is not often set in front of me, which is one reason that I defer so completely and uncompetitively to Sandy’s amazing record, beside which I’d have little to show but several pounds of grizzly bear.

Its taxonomic name is Ursus horribilis, but that, for sure, is not how it tastes. About thirty years ago in Alaska in early spring, Mike Potts, a trapper, asked me to help him write a brochure for dogsled trips he wanted to sell to tourists from the Lower Forty-eight. Since I wouldn’t take his money (in part because he had none), he paid me in food. One evening, the fare included fresh shoulder of grizzly, fried in its own raging fat by his wife, Adeline, and set on a table in their cabin, in Eagle Indian Village. A couple of days earlier, Potts and another trapper had been on the Fortymile River, and returned to Eagle by canoe, a journey that took them out of Alaska and into Yukon Territory and back into Alaska on the Yukon River.

The bear was walking upwind, downriver, looking the other way—just on the Canadian side of the border. The two raised their rifles, fired, and knocked it into the United States. Halved at the waist, it has been hanging in Potts’ butchery, a few steps from his cabin. . . . Burgundy is the color of the grizzly’s flesh. With the coat gone, its body is an awesome show of muscular anatomy. The torso hangs like an Eisenhower jacket, short in the middle, long in the arms, muscles braided and bulging. The claws and cuffs are still there. A great deal of fat is on the back. The legs, still joined, suggest a middle linebacker, although the thought is flattering to football.

Adeline would not eat the shar-cho—in Hungwitchin (her language), the brown, or grizzly, bear.

She will eat lynx, she said, which is “just like turkey,” and wolf, which recalls canned beef. But not this, never this meat. There might be taste but there was terror in the bear.

Adeline cooked a platter of moose and set it on the table beside a platter of bear—two large mounds of sliced meat at least eight inches high. In addition to the three of us, a couple of other people were present. You reached for the meat with your own fork. Steadily, the pile of grizzly meat diminished, not so the moose.

The moose was tough. I ate little of it. The grizzly was tender with youth and from a winter in the den. More flavorful than any wild meat I have eaten, it expanded my life list—muskrat, weasel, deer, moose, musk ox, Dall sheep, whale, lion, coachwhip, rattlesnake . . . grizzly. And now a difference overcame me with regard to bears. In strange communion, I had chewed the flag, consumed the symbol of the total wild, and, from that meal forward, if a bear should ever wish to reciprocate, it would only be what I deserve.

The rattlesnake was canned. The flag of Alaska is dark blue behind gold stars that form the constellation of the Great Bear.

Soon after the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was passed, in 1971, which resulted in the reorganization of Alaskan land on a vast and complex scale, I developed a strong desire to go there, stay there, and write about the state in its transition. When I asked William Shawn, The New Yorker’s editor, if he would approve and underwrite the project, his response was firm and negative. Why? Not because it was an unworthy subject, not because The New Yorker was over budget, but because he didn’t want to read about any place that cold. He had a similar reaction to Newfoundland (“Um, uh, well, uh, is it cold there?”). Newfoundland, like Florida, is more than a thousand miles below the Arctic Circle, but Mr. Shawn shivered at the thought of it. I never went to work in Newfoundland, but, like slowly dripping water, I kept mentioning Alaska until at last I was in Chicago boarding Northwest 3.

The first long river trip I made up there was on the Salmon and the Kobuk, on the south slope of the Brooks Range. At some point, I learned and noted that the forest Eskimos of that region valued as a great delicacy the fat behind a caribou’s eye. (I am recycling this anecdote and the one that follows from a tribute to Mr. Shawn that appeared in the issue of December 28, 1992.) Pat Pourchot, of the federal Bureau of Outdoor Recreation (in recent years Alaska’s commissioner of natural resources), had organized the river trip and collected the provisions. Pourchot’s fields of special knowledge did not include food. For breakfasts, he brought along a large supply of Pop-Tarts encrusted in pink icing and filled with raspberry jam. This caused me, in the manuscript ultimately delivered to the magazine, to present from the banks of the Kobuk River a philosophical choice:

Lacking a toaster, and not caring much anyway, we eat them cold. They invite a question. To a palate without bias—the palate of an open-minded Berber, the palate of a travelling Martian—which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye?

There was in those days something known as “the Shawn proof.” From fact-checkers, other editors, and usage geniuses known as “readers,” there were plenty of proofs, but this austere one stood alone and seldom had much on it, just isolated notations of gravest concern to Mr. Shawn. If he had an aversion to cold places, it was as nothing beside his squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon food. I had little experience with him in restaurants, but when I did go to a restaurant with him his choice of entrée ran to cornflakes. He seemed to look over his serving flake by flake to see if any were moving. On the Shawn proof, beside the words quoted above, he had written in the wide, white margin—in the tiny letters of his fine script—“the pop tart.”

So I have no idea by what freakishness of inattention Mr. Shawn had approved my application, a few years earlier, to go around rural Georgia with a woman who collected, and in many cases ate, animals dead on the road. She actually had several agendas, foremost of which was that she—Carol Ruckdeschel—and her colleague Sam Candler in the Georgia Natural Areas Council were covering the state in quest of wild acreages that might be preserved before it was too late. Under this ecological fog, Mr. Shawn seems not to have noticed the dead animals, let alone thought of them as anybody’s food, but I was acutely conscious from Day One of the journey and Day One of the writing that my first and perhaps only reader was going to be William Shawn. It shaped the structure, let me tell you. Where to begin? With the weasel we ate the first night out? Are you kidding, I asked myself, and did not need to wait for the answer. This was an episodic narrative of eleven hundred miles—embracing an isolated valley in the Appalachian north and Cemocheckobee Creek, in the far south—and I could start in the shrewdest possible place in a structure to be shaped like a nautilus by chronological flashback. Where to begin? Near Hunger and Hardship Creek, on the Swainsboro Road, in Emanuel County, we had come upon a dying turtle—a snapping turtle. There had been a funny scene with a sheriff who tried to shoot the turtle at point-blank range and missed. A turtle is not a weasel. Snapping turtles are not unknown to commercial soupmakers. Weighing a snapping turtle against weasels and water moccasins did not require consultation. The scene on the trip that had followed the turtle was a stream-channelization project—no food for squeamishness there. And after the turtle and the channelization I could go off into the biography of the central figure (Carol Ruckdeschel) and I’d have managed what turned out to be eight thousand words of a Shawn-wise beginning before I had to start over and eat that weasel.

I turned in the manuscript and went for a five-day walk in my own living room. The phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Mr. McPhee. How are you?” He spoke in a very light, very low, and rather lilting voice, not a weak voice, but diffident to a spectacular extent for a man we called the iron mouse.

“Fine, thank you, Mr. Shawn. How are you?”

“Fine, thank you. Is this a good time to be calling?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, I liked your story . . . No. I didn’t like your story. I could hardly read it. But that woman is closer to the earth than I am. Her work is significant. I’m pleased to publish it.”

Carol measured the weasel. She traced him on paper and fondled his ears. His skull and skin would go into the university’s research collection.

As a research biologist, she gathered skulls and pelts for Georgia State University, whose students in their labs wore them out so quickly that they needed frequent replacement.

With a simple slice, she brought out a testicle; she placed it on a sheet of paper and measured it. Three-quarters of an inch. Slicing smoothly through the weasel’s fur, she began to remove the pelt. Surely, she worked the skin away from the long neck. The flesh inside the pelt looked like a segment of veal tenderloin. “I lived on squirrel last winter,” she said. “Every time you’d come to a turn in the road, there was another squirrel. I stopped buying meat. I haven’t bought any meat in a year, except for some tongue. I do love tongue.” While she talked, the blade moved in light, definite touches. “Isn’t he in perfect shape?” she said. “He was hardly touched. You really lose your orientation when you start skinning an animal that’s been run over by a Mack truck.”

“Fine, thank you, Mr. Shawn. How are you?”

Carol put the weasel on the tines of a long fork and roasted it over the coals. “How do you like your weasel?” Sam asked me. “Extremely well done,” I said. Carol sniffed the aroma of the roast. “It has a wild odor,” she said. “You know it’s not cow. The first time I had bear, people said, ‘Cut the fat off. That’s where the bad taste is.’ I did, and the bear tasted just like cow. The next bear, I left the fat on.” The taste of the weasel was strong and not unpleasant. It lingered in the mouth after dinner. The meat was fibrous and dark.

A reading from the Book of Leviticus, the eleventh chapter, verses 1-3: “And the Lord spake unto Moses and to Aaron, saying unto them, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth. Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.” 20-23: “All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you. Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth; Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind. But all other flying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an abomination unto you.” 29-30: “These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind, and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.” No one west of Hoboken needs to be told what mountain oysters are, least of all Scott Davis, a Union Pacific engineer, who was driving not a train but his Suburban when the subject came up between us, east of the Laramie Range. We were on our way through falling snow to Bill, Wyoming, to catch a coal train to Black Thunder Mine, and Scott said he was sort of hungry for mountain oysters. He knew a place in Douglas where we could get them. It had been a while since his last testicle.

I must have been telling him about Chris Collis, a Nevada brand inspector whose work I had once described, and about an evening I spent with Chris and his family in a small mountain valley above seven thousand feet, where the Collises kept sixty-seven head of their own cattle. Chris, Karen, and their children—Christopher, Gerry, and Eleni—were there to round up and brand calves. Watching them from a corral fence, I scribbled notes:

Full-blood Saler bull calf, roped on one hind leg, screaming. Dad lifts him, flips him, marks his ears. He slices off the tip of the scrotum as if he were scissoring the tip of a cigar. He squeezes into the light the pearl-gray glistening ellipsoid oysters. He does not cut the cords but works them with the blade—scraping, shaving, thinning until they part. The process greatly reduces loss of blood. The calf’s eyeballs, having rotated backwards, are two-thirds white. . . . “Who’s going to eat the oysters?” Christopher says. Calf No. 6 is also a bull. These are not young calves, and they are hard to hold. They weigh at least three hundred pounds. At last, this one is stretched out, bawling, tongue protruding far, eyeballs largely white. From the bunched animals across the corral a cow emerges, boldly approaches the people and the prostrate calf, and smells it. Identification positive. He is hers. She goes on snuffling him but does not become aggressive. “Some cows would try to hook or butt you,” Chris remarks. Six-year-old Eleni . . . is holding the vaccination gun and the antiseptic spray. “Get behind him,” her father tells her, accepting the vaccine. He tries to hand her the oysters. She says firmly, “I don’t want ’em.” Soon Gerry is carrying a cup of oysters. Hereabouts, they appear on menus as entrées. “They are real rich, like sweetbreads,” Chris says. “You’ve probably had mountain oysters before. You cook them in a Dutch oven. You brown them in oil and garlic, and bake them. They are also called fries.”

At the Plains Restaurant, in Douglas, Wyoming, they were called mountain oysters. You would not compare them to Teuscher truffes. They looked, however, like a generous plateful of filled chocolates that had been left out in the sun. They met Scott’s expectations, and, actually, mine. Taste like? They tasted like mountain oysters. If I were forced to compare them to a common food, I would call them grilled macho chicken hearts. I did not get up from the table prepared to screw my weight in wildcats.

After a research trip to the Vestmann Islands, in Iceland, I brought two puffins through U.S. customs at Newark. They weighed down my suitcase, but declaring them slipped my mind. One puffin was fresh, the other had been smoked. I bought them in a grocery store on Heimaey (hay-may), an island about seven miles off Iceland’s south coast. Puffins are regarded as adorable birds, and I am not unmindful of the hostile correspondence this story could arouse. But, stranger, stay thy hand. Iceland has more puffins than Frank Perdue had chickens in his lifetime. There are a million puffins in the Vestmann Islands alone.

Islanders collect puffin eggs by belaying down the faces of sheer high cliffs and filling baskets. When they collect living puffins, they are sitting in niches or hanging from ropes as well. They eat them smoked, salted, boiled, or fried. Pall Helgason, of Heimaey, said, “Puffins, women, and wine are alike. The older they grow, the better they taste.” A fisherman in the harbor told me that he roasts his puffins for one hour, turns the oven off, and removes the puffin thirty minutes later. He also boils puffins in salt water—a two-hour simmer with the lid on. Hot on my plate one evening at the Hotel Gest-gjafinn were three smoked puffin breasts—dark brown, smooth, and leathery. They were as red as wine inside. Their taste was an almost exact cross between corned beef and kippered herring. They were served with large cubes of butter, boiled small potatoes, and thin slices of sweet pickle.

Not many years before, a long fissure had suddenly opened on Heimaey, running through grazing land, low and flat, and pouring forth incandescent lava. Before long, a volcano stood there—seven hundred feet high. The lavas that produced it spread over farms and into town and threatened to enter and destroy Iceland’s most important fishing harbor. The nation fought the lava with fire hoses, saving the harbor. The lava deeply buried or otherwise obliterated two hundred buildings.

Under the lava is Olafshus, home of the late Erlendur Jonsson, master catcher of puffins. Olafshus had territorial rights to Alfsey, which is two miles from Heimaey. He and a crew of three or four sat in high niches in the dizzying cliffs of Alfsey, and with long-handled nets caught puffins in flight. In a four-week season, Erlendur would be content if he returned to Olafshus, and his wife, Olafia, with twelve thousand puffins. Olafshus went very quickly under the lava. The puffin is among the nation’s emblematic birds. With its bright-white chest, its orange webbed feet, and its big orange scimitar bill, it could be an iced toucan.

From Alaska, I flew to Newark with moose meat one time—actually, mooseburger, given to me in a five-pound block by Ed and Ginny Gelvin, who lived in Central, about a hundred miles northeast of Fairbanks. They had raised their children on moose, and used it in just about every form in which “Joy of Cooking” calls for beef. Our own children were young and, in those days, were on the approximate level of William Shawn as venturesome eaters. The solution to this problem was simple. I shaped the moose meat into patties, grilled them over charcoal, and set them on the table without comment.

Once, also, I took a Yukon River king salmon—a forty-pound chinook—out of Jim Scott’s gill net in the eddy under Eagle Bluff, wondering if I could get it to New Jersey in an edible state. We froze it whole in Jim’s freezer in Eagle, and it stayed there long enough to get pretty far up the mineral-hardness scale. On the morning when the mail plane was coming and would take me away, we wrapped the big king in enough insulation material to make it look like some sort of mummy. The month was July. The Fahrenheit temperature, in this hottest and coldest region of Alaska, was in the seventies. The mail plane, a Cessna, showed up. I put the fish in it and flew to Fairbanks, two hundred miles. Because I wasn’t leaving Fairbanks for a day or two, I took the fish to a restaurant and checked it in to the restaurant’s freezer. The itinerary from Fairbanks to Newark was in two parts—overnight to Sea-Tac and an early-morning plane east. The salmon went as checked baggage. In Newark, I waited by the baggage rack, and waited, and at last the king salmon appeared among the suitcases. I did not inspect it. Outside the terminal, the temperature was above ninety. You could drink the air. I had been met by my wife, Yolanda, and we put the fish in the car and drove the forty miles home. In the stifling heat of our back hall (my middle initial, A., does not stand for air-conditioning), I unrolled the many layers of Jim Scott’s insulation. The fish hit the floor and damned near cracked the bricks. It was as hard as granite. We made gravlax.

I should finish the story about the mooseburger. The kids ate it without comment, their gentle chatter focussed on their usual weighty topics. When they reached for more burgers, I told them they were eating an Alaskan moose. “Eeeeeeee!” “Uhhhhhhh!” “Gross!” “Disgusting!” A few of them still talk to me.

The longest time I ever lived on foraged wild food came about in this manner: While I was in college, I was the left-handed catcher on a summer softball team that represented the Gallup Poll. Joshua L. Miner III, our shortstop, was a local schoolteacher who later taught at Gordonstoun, in Scotland, and returned to the United States bringing Outward Bound with him. He was its original American director. His first two Outward Bound schools were set up in Colorado and Minnesota, then he added one on Hurricane Island, in Maine. I went there with him to scout the scene for a possible piece for The New Yorker, and among the people Josh introduced me to was Euell Gibbons, who was teaching students how to survive on nothing but foraged foods—not a particularly large challenge in summer on an island in Penobscot Bay. Back in the office in New York, I asked to see Mr. Shawn, and went in and told him about my visit to the island, and proposed a long fact piece on the Outward Bound movement. He said, slowly and politely, “Oh.” After a time, he added, “Oh, that would not be for us.” He said Outward Bound reminded him of Hitler Youth. Gibbons, though, sounded interesting. Why not just go off somewhere—somewhere other than Outward Bound—with Euell Gibbons, and do a Profile of him? The fact that Gibbons wrote about edible wild vegetation to the exclusion of almost all animal tissue but blue-eyed scallops had not been lost on Mr. Shawn. So, in mid-November, 1966, I went off with Gibbons from his home in Troxelville, Pennsylvania, and spent nearly a week canoeing down the Susquehanna River, backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, and living on dock, burdock, chicory, chickweed, ground-cherries, groundnuts, dandelions, and oyster mushrooms, among many other things we foraged. For me, as a survivor on wild food, that personal best was only a few days. Euell, in an earlier phase of his life, had lived exclusively on foraged food for three years.

For dinner on the first night—beside the river, blowing white streams of breath—we consumed boiled whole dandelions, boiled Jerusalem artichokes, ground-cherry salad, and pennyroyal tea. The dandelions were on the old side and tough. The ground-cherries, of the nightshade family, seemed to me to have “the flavor of tomatoes, with a wild, musky undertone.”

Gibbons: “These things are not substitutes for tame foods. They have flavors of their own, and it is not fair to them to call them by the name of something else.”

“Jerusalem,” in this context, was a corruption of the Italian girasole.

Gibbons: “These are not artichokes. They’re sunflower tubers.”

With a knife and fork, he laid one open and then scooped up a mound of the white flesh. It was steaming hot. “Boy!” he said. “That goes down very gratefully. Just eating greens, you can get awfully damn hungry. We’ll eat plenty of greens, but we need these, too.”

He warned me that breakfast is the roughest meal to get through on any survival trip, because that is usually the time when the wild foods are most dissimilar from the foods one is used to at home.

For our first lunch, lying on a gravel bar, we had had walnuts, hickory nuts, and persimmons. For our second lunch, on the shore of a big island, we had walnuts, hickory nuts, watercress, and persimmons.

Like people in all parts of the country, we were eating essentially the same lunch we had had the day before, and it was not much of a thrill.

Before dinner, we had catnip tea.

He said that catnip is a mild sedative, and I drank all I could hold.

Then, in addition to dandelions, we ate oyster mushrooms, big as saucers. Thick, steaming, and delicious, they had the aroma of oyster stew and the taste of grilled steak. Or so it seemed. In the morning, foraging a few hundred yards from the river, we found a patch of ground that a farmer’s plow could not reach because of a bend in a very small stream. On that fifth of an acre, we found wild mustard, lamb’s-quarters, chickweed, wild spearmint, catnip, winter cress, groundnuts, and off-the-scale dandelions.

“This is the best dandelion field I’ve ever got into,” he said as he pried one after another out of the earth. “I’ve seen cultivated dandelions that weren’t as big as this!”

Lunch: boiled dandelion crowns, walnuts, and catnip tea sweetened with sugar. He had made the sugar eight months before, in Troxelville, and we had brought it with us intending—after the first couple of days—to introduce condiments into our diet, one per meal.

“I’ve made sugar from the sap of red maples, silver maples, Norway maples—hell, yes—and from walnut trees, butternut trees, sycamores, black birches. This? This is sugar-maple sugar. This is living.”

After stashing the canoe and heading south from Clarks Ferry on the Appalachian Trail, we spent the night at a lean-to shelter, where we introduced vegetable oil.

The night was going to be clear and cold, and we kept the fire high. By seven, when Gibbons had the two frying pans out and was beginning to sauté dandelion roots in one and sliced groundnuts in the other, the temperature at the open end of the lean-to was below freezing and the temperature at the closed end was almost a hundred degrees. The distance between these extremes was eight feet. Gibbons seemed at home there, cooking, with his face baking and his back freezing, and the dinner he served was outstanding—wild-spearmint tea, piles of crisp dandelion-root tidbits, and great quantities of groundnuts so skillfully done that they seemed to be a refinement of home-fried potatoes. Having fried food was an appealing novelty. We were hungry, and we ate as rapidly as Nilotic tribesmen, without conversing. Gibbons looked up once and said, “The Smithsonian has a very good man on starchy roots.” Then he went on eating.

It had in its taste the tonic qualities of the scent of pine, but it was not at all bitter. I had imagined, on first trying it the night before, that I would have a feeling I was drinking turpentine. Instead, I had had the novel experience of an unfamiliar taste that was related to a completely familiar scent—a kind of direct translation from one idiom to another.

My daughters consider me the least observant person they know (“A rhinoceros could walk through the living room and he wouldn’t notice it”)—a claim that is not unsupported by the fact that I have never seen a rattlesnake in the wild. In Western states for forty-odd years I have been going into rattlesnake terrain and not seen one. I have slept on their ground. I have walked ridges where I was told to step carefully because rattlesnakes would be everywhere like earthworms after rain. With a sedimentologist, I went up a trail to an outcrop in Iowa past a sign that said “EXPECT TO SEE RATTLESNAKES.” No apparent rattlesnakes. In Atlanta, I shared a room with Carol Ruckdeschel’s young diamondback rattlesnake, Zebra, but he was living in a big jar and didn’t count. On Cumberland Island, off the Georgia coast, Sam Candler, who has spent much of his life there, was telling me one day about having discovered a timber rattler under the driver’s seat of his Jeep. The Jeep was in motion when he made the discovery and he was the driver. The rattlesnakes of Cumberland Island are thicker than fire hoses and so numerous they’re like earthworms after rain. So I’m told. I told Sam that I had yet to see my first rattler in the wild. “You what?” he said, pulling his beard in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m serious.”

“Well,” he said, “let’s go!” We went outside and got into his Jeep. I looked it over first. Sam knows the name and address of every rattlesnake in the northern five thousand acres of the island. He tells stories unflattering to their intelligence: “If a line of people walks past a rattlesnake, it aims at the first person, strikes at the second, and hits the third.” He stopped near a stand of palmettos, walked confidently to the edge of it, and peered in. Nobody home. Near an immense live oak, he showed confidence again. No snake. We drove around for a couple of hours, frequently stopping at rattlesnake loci familiar to him for a lifetime. His confidence ebbed and was replaced by amazement.

The Rocky Mountain geologist David Love, who generously made field trips with me and camped with me and taught me the structure and stratigraphy of Wyoming, was no less surprised than Sam Candler. David had grown up in the geographical center of the state on a ranch from which no other buildings were visible to the distant horizons. A man named Bill Grace, wanted for murder, had come through the ranch one evening when David and his brother were young boys. Their parents knew who Grace was, and did not think ill of him for killing a man who had it coming to him. The boys knew that Grace was wanted for murder. Their mother asked him to stay for dinner. The boys happened to have come upon and killed a five-foot rattlesnake earlier in the day. Their mother served it creamed on toast. The boys were cautioned sternly by their parents not to use the word “rattlesnake” at any point during the meal.

They were to refer to it as chicken, since a possibility existed that Bill Grace might not be an eater of adequate sophistication to enjoy the truth. The excitement was too much for the boys. Despite the parental injunction, gradually their conversation at the table fished its way toward the snake. Casually—while the meal was going down—the boys raised the subject of poisonous vipers, gave their estimates of the contents of local dens, told stories of snake encounters, and so forth. Finally, one of them remarked on how very good rattlers were to eat.

The boys went into a state of catatonic paralysis. In the pure silence, their mother said, “More chicken, Bill?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Bill Grace.

My life list of exotic food is not something I feel compelled to increase. I have no kinship with list-conscious birders who get into their vans and drive round-the-clock because someone somewhere has sighted an endangered warbler. I simply do not think like that. So I ate ostrich at the 1906 Restaurant, in Callicoon, New York. So what? Ostrich is a specialty there, and it’s arterially correct. So I stretched the list a little by eating cow tendons, fermented white soybeans, fermented black soybeans, stewed conch, sea cucumbers, and durian at my friend Andrew Co’s Sakura Express, on Witherspoon Street in my home town. So what? Durian, also known as monthong, is a fruit that smells strongly fecal and tastes like tiramisu. Sea cucumber, the holothurian echinoderm, has a muscular body and an extensive respiratory tree that soften deliciously in steam, becoming somewhat gelatinous and not unlike ox marrow. I ate lion and whale when I was nineteen years old on separate visits to Keen’s English Chop House, on Thirty-sixth Street. I was gathering experience. Betsy Candler, whose husband is Sam, cooked porpoise one time and withheld its identity until she had asked what I thought I was eating. I said, “Whale.” On another occasion, when she grilled a coachwhip, I didn’t know it from a corn snake. Under cross-examination, though, I would have to admit that last summer certain terminal frustrations may have come into play when I went into a restaurant in Denver and ordered rattlesnake. Buckhorn Exchange, 1000 Osage Street—on the walls enough stuffed heads to make a quorum in the House of Representatives. I was with grandchildren and I still have the check: “6 sarsaparilla. 1 rattlesnake.”

Monica Wojcik, an ’07 Princeton graduate who, in her senior year, ran the Boston Marathon and, with her mother, the San Francisco Marathon, once gave me a drink of bee spit before we went off on a sixteen-mile bike ride. She called it bee spit but it was actually synthetic hornet juice—Vaam brand, available only in Japan. Liquid essence of Vespa mandarinia japonica, it had been the beverage of choice of Naoko Takahashi on her way to her gold medal in the Olympic marathon at Sydney. Monica’s father brings it home to his athlete wife and daughters from business trips to Tokyo. Monica’s mother, Jane Wojcik, has run marathons in twenty-three of the fifty states, now and again after training on bee spit. In powder form, it comes out of a silvery packet and quickly dissolves in water. Characters covering the packets tell some of the bee-spit story. Vespa mandarinia japonica—the Japanese giant hornet—flies about a hundred kilometres a day ingesting but not digesting small insects, which it carries home in globular form to feed to its larvae. The juice that goes for the gold is in the larvae. While the adult feeds the larvae, the larvae reciprocate with fresh juice, a blend of seventeen amino acids. The acids rapidly burn the adult hornet’s abdominal fat, releasing the energy on which the adult flies another hundred kilometres ingesting small insects. Vaam, vaam, thank you, Ma’am—Vespa amino-acid mixture. If you are not into cycling or marathon runs, you can sit on a sofa, drink Vaam, and lose weight. Monica primed me with another glass of bee spit before another sixteen miles, a week or two later. To be honest, it failed to turn me into Barry Bonds. I cannot say that it was any more effective than the shot of bourbon I have every night before dinner. But it put a new entry at the top of my life list: